Kingsley Amis

Any man in the company of two women is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be.

If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the War, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.

People who sound insincere all the time […] should not expect others to notice the difference when they try to sound insincere.

I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone […], only to find as usual that I was stuck with myself.[…] Two's company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one's a crowd.

[S]omething was being kept from him. But, short of scopolamine, hypnosis or wild horses, he knew he would never hear from her what it was.

From an outsider's point of view, a naked woman out of doors is either a sun-worshipper or a rape victim; a man in the same state is either a sexual criminal or a plain lunatic.

[I]t's human to choose any sort of path into the future rather than face the long road back to what you've left behind.

The real trouble with liars […] was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth.

As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution.

Then, because it was every cinematic doctor's exit line, the doctor added, "I'll see myself out."

He's taken to going off for hours at a time, wandering round those woods that lead off from the common apparently. Nothing there apart from trees and sexual maniacs.

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.